Storage is very important. When you are prepping, it is important to store your food in storage containers and NOT in sacks. Moisture is your enemy, as it will lead to mildew, mold, insects, rodents, and germs that you cannot afford to have spread throughout your shelter. If what you are using isn’t food grade, make sure you have food grade plastic lining the buckets or tubs. Food safety and integrity is important to the health of your family. You cannot afford to contaminate your food-stores.
I was brought up as a poor country boy. Our family did all the old-fashioned methods of living. We heated with wood, canned food, did the garden and had a well, killed pigs/hogs, and had a cow for milk and butter. Oh yeah, we also had a two-seater for comfort and had that luxury until I graduated from high school. I still appreciate the information you try to get out to upper level folks. It takes me back in time.

I would agree that the moral ground of choosing to not have a firearm is great for some people. I have a family and am prepared for our needs with supplies and learned skills and would not expect to need assistance of others. I am currently working on extra supplies that I might be able to distribute to others in need. I like to help others and do not see the world as an evil place. Unfortunately with a catastrophic event law enforcement is often not available. History and current events in less “civilized” areas has proven that without law then anarchy and predatory animals are often unleashed. I feel that it is my moral obligation to protect my family. If I took the stance that I would go firearm free for moral reasons then I don’t think that I could live with myself if I was powerless to stop thugs from overpowering me then stealing our hard earned supplies necessary for our survival and then brutalizing my wife and young daughter when I might have been able to stop it with force. If accepting the risk of being less able to protect your family is acceptable to you and your family for moral reasons then god bless you and I support your decision. Could I live with the “stain” on my soul for protecting my family from predatory animals using force? Yup. How many “stains” could I tolerate….depends on how many predators and how many bullets I have. I do not live in fear and do not think that my commitment to my family protection as a husband and father makes me psychotic, paranoid, pathetic, a coward or a sociopath and feel slighted at the suggestion otherwise in your post. I would say that each of us must make the moral decision themselves about use of firearms for protection. I don’t judge others decisions and wouldn’t expect others to judge mine. I think I am a realist. A protective firearm can be like a fire extinguisher- you don’t have one because you want to use it or expect a problem but stuff happens.

In addition to this list, may I refer you to the Weston Price Foundation and the book Nourishing Traditions? These two sources will help us to decide on the healthiest versions of all these foods; the end goal is to remain healthy and nourished so that we can enjoy all these things we store! Thanks for the article–it set my mental wheels to turning 🙂
The 575 bunkers for lease are owned by a ranching company that grazes cattle on the land around them. Vicino is leasing the bunkers from that company, and then sub-leasing the bunkers to his customers. The rest of the bunkers on the massive site — there are said to be 802 in all — are under the control of other owners and are not being offered for lease by Vicino.
The commercial wire shelves on big casters I got on Wish.com. I purchased (3) 5 shelf shelve sets. My 5 gallon buckets of sugar, wheat, oats, pasta, beans, rice, pancake mix, powdered milk, powdered eggs, and homemade cake/brownies. I can homemade pasta sauce, chicken chunks, beef chunks, and pork chunks. Hamburger is cooked and dehydrated for skillet meals. I have 5 gallons of raw honey, 2 gallons of molasses. Buy cases of canned veggies when they go on sale and put together zip lock bags of bread ingredients stored in 5 gallon buckets since baked bread is a staple for meals.
I love this article and absolutely agree with you. I wanted to know what advice you could give if something like the power grid goes down? The reason I ask is because of the importance of keeping food in a COOL, dry, place. I am currently stationed at Fort Rucker, AL. It is blazing hot here and I would be worried that if the power grid went down, all that work that I did to ensure we had enough food and water would be wasted due to the heat. I know there are circumstances that call for bugging in or out but with a wife and two young kids, bugging in would be my first option. I hope something like this never happens but it is better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Just hoping for some good advice on how to keep food and water from going bad even if keeping it cool is not an option. Thank you for your time and help!
Legacy Foods 120 Serving Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner Bucket is a great option for vegetarians or people who want more of a bland foundation that you mix with other ingredients. For $299, one bucket covers two people for two weeks at 1,500 calories per day. Although other companies drop the calories to cut costs, Legacy assumed you would add more ingredients to their base, so we thought the relatively low calories per day was acceptable.
I don’t get paranoid about what I put back but if God gives me more than I want, and I can’t give it away, I do what I can to save it. I figure there is a reason for it. I know what hunger is and it’s not pretty. I’ve learned to forage and raise most of what we need. When the time comes, we’ll be ok and being elders, we might not be able to have access to things when it all falls apart. No one can prepare for every scenio, just prepare for what you can and pray you’ll never need it.

This country is one of the safest in the world. We have no killer animals. We don’t have earthquakes. There are no major tsunamis. We don’t really have to prep for a huge natural disaster – and there’s very little you could do to prepare for a nuclear event even if you wanted to – so we prep more pragmatically. Suppose you lose your job and money’s an issue. Or the electrical grid goes out and the food chain goes down and all of a sudden every man and his dog is arguing over a bag of sugar. Do you have your own supplies? Do you have the means to cook? And what about keeping warm – could you make a fire? Some of us buy food through an app; groceries are delivered to our front doors. Do people know how to survive without electricity?

So far so good. I broke out the crackers; literally because they came apart in my hands. This wasn’t the fault of the manufacturer I don’t think. I was just clumsy. Regardless, once I had my peanut butter on them they were great. I finished up with the dessert, Vanilla pudding which to prepare you needed to mix a little water in the bag and shake the bag for 60 seconds before it was ready. This was definitely good!
For survival purposes, think calories, not meals per day. An adult will require between 2,000 and 2,400 calories a day nominally, and more if they are active. Children require less, but the effects of malnutrition and starvation hit them harder. You can live for quite a while on reduced calories to make your stores go further, but your activity levels in the aftermath depending on what is required of you may dictate high calorie consumption. Plan accordingly before you hit “rationing” levels of supply.
How would you like to call a missile base home? America built 107 missile bases around the country during the arms race in the 1960s, including the Atlas F Missile Silo located about 130 miles north of Albany. It was decommissioned after only four years and has sat dormant and neglected for decades, eventually selling for $160,000 in 1997 and again for $575,000 in 2015. Bear in mind that the “super hardened” facility, built for the equivalent of $100 million in today’s dollars, was designed to withstand almost any bomb imaginable.

So, here is my list of indispensable foods to store in quantity for hard times. I have tried to take into account caloric as well as nutritional content, ease of storage, shelf life, and the intangible of enjoyable to eat. Let’s face it, it doesn’t have to taste good to keep you alive, but it does to keep you happy! Never underestimate the power of a good tasty meal to make things seem better, and never underestimate the power of a positive outlook to help survive in hard conditions!

Anyway, another thought runnin’ round my brain as of late is a mistake Gaye’s friend did, “Yes, you can use oxygenators and all that stuff. I tried that and I ended up throwing out all the food. It was rancid. I processed $1,200.00 of food at a local church facility in Salt Lake City, Utah. I threw it out one year later. It was a volunteer church group that did not know how many oxygenators to put in each #10 can.” – //foodstoragemoms.com/2015/11/dehydrating-food-for-long-term/
What Jennifer, a self-described prepper who declined to share her last name for security reasons, didn’t anticipate was the sheer force of Maria’s rains and 155 mile per hour winds — and how little the storm shutters would do to protect her home. “I was taking water out of the bedrooms, the living rooms, the hallways,” she says. “The house was flooded.” At one point, a piece of debris flew off a neighbor’s roof and got stuck between the outside wall of Jennifer’s pantry and the storm shutters, ripping off a pair of windows in the process.
When it burns, EPS produces heavy, acrid and toxic smoke. This obviously presents another serious problem when you are in a confined space, from which there is no escape. Even a small event in which this material merely smoldered with no open flame can/would have dire consequences for the occupants. Exposure to the heavy smoke generated, even if only for a few minutes, has been shown to be lethal.

I would contend that most (if not all) “long shelf life” dehydrated/freeze dried food products fail to deliver the calorie and protein count that is required to survive. It is far more likely that you would have to double the quantity and cost to actually achieve any specified duration. If you don’t believe me, just examine the details in their advertising.

Great read, but #14 in my opinion is not good. Why is it always the prepper in the family that has to compromise? Prepping is not a number one priority, it is the only priority. There is nothing but prepping. It is not a way of life, it is life itself. What good will prepping do anyone if they are away on vacation when the lights go out or a nuclear blast occurs? What good is anything connected with survival if it is not with you 24/7/365.25? One window of opportunity is all an intentional or happenstance enemy needs to cull a prepper. Life is life and death is death and their is no inbetween. A little bit of further advice on bugging out, if you will allow. All this bogus info about bug out bags, bug out vehicles, and bug out locations is just a ton of suicidal bs as far as survival goes. Any bug out bag a person can reasonably carry will not provide enough food to last more than 60 days. We have tried this and dehydrated food is the only feasible plan one can have for lengthy time driven bugging out. Canned food is good, but extremely heavy. Dehydrated food and lifestraws will put you light years ahead of the pack{We dehydrate our own vegetables, fruits, and meats]. Vehicles will only get you killed so how do you take enough supplies to last a year or more. Well, the lowly wheel barrow works tremendously well. With or without a few homemade alterations, such as side bodies, the ‘Texas dump truck'[wheelbarrow] will carry an enormous amount of supplies and is easily hidden while we scout out an area or forage for food or the best drinking water. The wheelbarrow, in effect, is our bug out location. Whereever it is, we will not be far away.One person alone can carry a lot, a whole lot, and if you have two or more people the possibilites are almost unlimited. Make sure the inflatable tires are replaced with solid rubber if possible. We had no trouble in finding solid rubber replacement tires but if you do then get a hand pump and several tube repair kits. Garden utility wagons also work well. Even for carrying infants and small pets the wheelbarrow/garden wagon works great. Admittedly I do not live in the mountains and don’t really know how functional a wheelbarrow would be in that terrain, but it works great in the flatlands and hills. For the small amount of money invested and the positive results achieved a wheelbarrow is the way to go when shft. thanks and God bless.
The FDA is making significant changes to nutritional label laws that are rolling out over 2017 to 2018. Because some manufacturers have changed early and others haven’t, in some cases we couldn’t be as apples-to-apples in our data analysis as we’d like, particularly around vitamins and minerals. So we did some backdoor math by judging the amount of fruits and vegetables in each meal.
Austere Living Techniques- Everything gets harder when modern conveniences, luxuries really, disappear. Avoid feeling overwhelmed and helpless by practicing self-reliance and making do with less, now. Learn how to build cooking and camp fires, maintain hygiene, dispose of waste, control your body temperature and create what you need. This is not just for “bush life,” and will prove valuable when the electricity and gas is cut off.
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Many municipal water supplies are disinfected with chloramine now, not chlorine. (That's Texas law, for example.) The difference is that chlorine evaporates, while chloramine does not. It can only be removed by chemical reaction or charcoal filtration. For that reason, I avoid tap water as much as possible. But one nice thing about it in a survival situation is that, based on personal experience at least, it does not go bad.

One of the “skills” every prepper should learn (and learn this week or next) is foraging for edibles in and around their homes. Search the library or order a book on Amazon…one with pictures…to learn which weeds provide vitamins and minerals and how to spot them (and their poisonous look-a-likes) in YOUR neighborhood. The day MAY come when that is ALL that is available to eat because the mice, rats, birds, cats and dogs have already been dispatched to feed hungry neighbors. Weeds are likely to still be around even after looters have torn out and dug up your gardens in search of food.

Common preparations include the creation of a clandestine or defensible retreat, haven, or bug out location (BOL) in addition to the stockpiling of non-perishable food, water, water-purification equipment, clothing, seed, firewood, defensive or hunting weapons, ammunition, agricultural equipment, and medical supplies. Some survivalists do not make such extensive preparations, and simply incorporate a "Be Prepared" outlook into their everyday life.

In the event of an EMP situation, I fully intend to band together with my neighbors to protect our neighborhood from outsiders who may to try to loot or worse. I fully intend to share resources if they are into that. I fully intend to share medical supplies, knowledge, recipes, seeds and more if necessary. I know for a fact that my neighbors and I differ greatly on political issues, and especially political candidates from every election since we’ve lived here. But in a SHTF situation, we’d all be in it together. Please remember that before jumping down each other’s throats in the comments here. We are all interested in being prepared, because we are all alarmed and or scared of what may happen in the future, because not everything is in our control. But our behavior toward each other is absolutely within our control.

I am really enjoying this site that I discovered through Pinterest. You make everything simple and so much easier to follow than most the prepper websites I have seen. I have even ordered the LDS Providential Living, and while the information contained therein is great, it is just not really practical stuff easily affordable on a budget. This startup guide is wonderful and I really enjoy the 12 month breakdown you have provided as well. I have added your boards, but it would be nice if you had a Pinterest pin on your site so that all your archives I could store as well. Thank you so much for all you are doing! I learned some really cheap ways to make fire starters from you.

11/4/18 Water securityEnable IntenseDebate Comments: Enable IntenseDebate CommentsThe average person in Europe uses 3,000−5,000 liters of water per day, of which the lion’s share is spent on food production – a considerable part on the other side of the globe. The world’s limited water resources are becoming an even more pressing issue as populations grow and climate change causes droughts in the global South and North. While studies have already provided a number of ways to reduce our consumption of water, this valuable information is often left unused. read mor […]

Prepping is such a personal thing that we cannot just take someone else’s list and think it will work for our needs. We need to develop a plan and have supplies that work for us given our needs and unique situation. If we live in an urban area our needs will be different than someone who lives on a farm,we might feel the need to have a bug out plan in place while others plan on staying put.
While media coverage has often focused on a certain gun-toting, masculine segment of the subculture, both women described being drawn to prepping as a form of female self-empowerment. As Bedford sees it, finding yourself unprepared in the midst of a crisis can be a “terrible feeling of weakness” for a mother. “It makes sense to be empowered and trained and have the right supplies—and in this case, to have extra food on hand—because as a mom in particular, your family just relies on you,” she said.